These features are showcased for your attention. Please test them and report any bugs you find on our Forum

Updated Packages

With a new release, we decided to also upgrade our base system to Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10). This includes many packages like the Kernel (2.6.27) and Xorg (7.4) .

Xorg 7.4

Xorg 7.4 provides many new features and is stabelizing the system very well. But be aware that they might be still some bugs especially when using very old graphicscards.

Linux kernel 2.6.27

The new Linux Kernel brings a lot of new exiting features and drivers. The most significant changes are the new builtin ath5k and ath9k wireless chipset drivers. Those support almost every wireless chip that is used by modern netbooks. In the Multimedia section there are some new TV card drivers avaiable.

New Deskbar

We decided to rewrite the deskbar from scratch, as some requested and wished features were simply not possible to release within the capabilities of gambas2.

The new Deskbar is written in Python (PyGTK), a popular language, that make even patches and plugins easier to write.

Deskbarv2 (internally called) includes a tasklist switcher that allows you to switch between open windows. The quicklaunch items were reorderd and now fit into one quicklaunch bar item.

Updated MAGI 2

We did some interesting work on MAGI 2. Besides a new outfit we included MeCOI as a search engine to MAGI 2. This will allow for easy, semantic searches like : “Show me my music library” that will automatically focus the music management application. This will also work for all kinds of settings.

Updated Zeebar

The Zeebar now has the function to bet set top or bottom of the screen. And it also got a manager to set manual links.

Updated Encode / now with SUPER Encode

We updated Encode ones more to make it the center for converting media. We also spend a lot of work on a new SUPER Encode, video conversion utility. It reassembles a well known Video conversion app and allows to set many detailed options for audio and video codecs.

Besides that we also included and updated YAVTD. YAVTD now has a graphical progressbar that shows the status of the currently downloading video.

If you want to create a VCD/SVCD/DVD or even XVCD/MVCDs it never was easier. With our newest application DeVeDe it is very easy to choose which output format you want and the assistant will also automatically convert the input material to fit the needs of the output.

Added Screenlets

You might know the little clever and useful apps sitting and perfectly fitting the desktop. ZevenOS 1.1 now includes those kinds of apps, also known as Screenlets.

A screenshot says more than thousand words :

Replacements

We also had to replace some applications for several reasons (mostly because of sugesstions from the community, so thanks )

First of all multimedia apps. We included Mplayer and as a GUI Gmplayer als default media player. As gmplayer is not longer maintained it is obvious we had to switch to something actively in development. We decided to Switch to Totem, as it not only can use ffmpeg Codecs (Win32 Codecs package) but also lets you choose between Gstreamer and Xine output and rendering engines.

Besides Totem we also replaced Quodlibet, as it was missing some features and plugins and had some stability issues. After a long search we decided to include rhythmbox as default music management software as it not only supports a huge amount of plugins but also has a excellent music management implementation.

Because of massive problems with the default mail application sylpheed we decided to replace it with the more advanced and feature and plugin rich big brother of sylpheed claws-mail. It has almost the same graphical user interface but is fully packed with nice clever features without getting any slower then sylpheed.

Known Issues / Minor Bugs

There are still some minor bugs left over in ZevenOS 1.1 . As we are all humans we make mistakes and did not manage to find and bugfix all of them.

Here are some known minor bugs, known so far:

- ZevenOS Bootscreen looks strange in low resolutions (i.e. 640×480)

- “Low Level Desktop” broken (need to set sawfish as session and use old deskbar)

- Streamtuner still buggy (crashes sometimes)